Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia III: De Coniecturis ed. by Josef Koch, Karl Bormann (review)

6~0 BOOK REVIEWS Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia III: De Coniecturis. Ed. By JosEF Kocn and KARL BoRMANN. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 197~. Pp. ~97. DM ~40. The periodization of history may be a requirement inherent in the historical enterprise itself, but it involves some unavoidable distortion. Thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) find themselves relegated to the expiring gasps of the Middle Ages or to the secondary status of mere precursors of a dawning era. Periodization requires its terminal personages, and these are inevitably assigned a marginal importance. But what the historical enterprise has created it can also destroy, and slowly but surely our persective into the no-man's-land of the late 14th-early 15th centuries is developing both in depth and breadth. One example of this development has been the increasing scholarly interest in Ockhamism and the nominalist influence. Another promising sign that our understanding of fifteenth-century culture is being steadily enriched is the remarkable growth of interest in the life and thought of Cusanus. In 193~ the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences embarked on the production of its critical Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia. That work might well have been completed by now had it not been interrupted (indeed partially obliterated) by World War II. In the last few years several important additions to this critical Opera have been published, thus bringing the entire project to a point from which completion no longer seems that dim distant dream it did a few short years ago. Along with the progress of the critical edition international interest in Cusanus grows apace. Apart from the incomplete Heidelberg Opera Omnia but in conjunction with it the Felix Meiner Verlag has been publishing a series, Schriften des Nikolaus von Kues in deutscher tJbersetzung. These texts initially did not contain the Latin version but more recent additions to the series are bilingual. The paperback volumes are of convenient size, are fully annotated, and contain substantial introductions by renowed Cusanus scholars. They are ideally suited for seminar work, perhaps even upper division undergraduate study. Furthermore, they make the works of Cusanus accessible to the specialist who is unable to afford the price of the increasingly expensive additions to the critical Opera Omnia. Italian, Portuguese, and even Japanese editions of select philosophical and religious works of Cusanus were published recently and, as unlikely as it may seem, a Japanese Cusanus association has been established! Regretably, English-language works and translations are not nearly as well represented in the Cusanus bibliographies as one might reasonably expect. With the availability of a critical text of Nicholas's works, British and American students of philosophy and religion should be encouraged to turn their attention to their 15th-century forebear. Cusanus studies could profit immeasurably, for example, from language-critical analysis. BOOK REVIEWS 621 With the exception of the De concordantia catholica, a reform document which Nicholas presented to the Council of Basel in 1433 or 1434, the De coniecturis is his longest and most ambitious work. It was written some few years after his famous De docta ignorantia (completed Feburary 12, 1440) and was referred to by name in that earlier, programmatic work. De docta ignorantia had not only raised again the crucial question of man's knowledge of God but had reemphasized the utter disproportion of the finite to the infinite. Compensating that anxiety-raising doctrine is Cusanus's well-known language describing God's relation to the world as a complicatio omnium, language which clearly gives rise to another kind of disquietude. For the consolations offered by pantheism and mystical vision collide at many points with Christian tradition and ecclesiastical authority. Fortunately for Cusanus, his political sagacity and indefatigable energy had won him the red hat and thereby immunized him from the attacks of theologians like Johnannes Wenck. As Josef Koch pointed out some years ago, although Cusanus had envisaged the De coniecturis as an elucidation of several issues presented in De docta ignorantia, by the time he got around to completing De coniecturis his ideas had evolved in the direction of Proclan Neoplatonism, a metamorphosis from a Seinsmetaphysik to an Einheitsmetaphysik. It seems that Nicholas had been introduced to the writings...